


One of Those Conversations

by drekadair



Series: Tales from the Folly [2]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-28
Updated: 2017-01-28
Packaged: 2018-09-20 09:19:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9484694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drekadair/pseuds/drekadair
Summary: Nightingale offers Peter an apology.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Set during The Hanging Tree and contains a few teensy, tiny little spoilers for the same. If you haven't read the book yet, there's no real reason not to read this fic: the spoilers are so non-spoilery I almost didn't bother with a spoiler alert.
> 
> I really appreciated all the kudoes everyone left for "Shaken," but don't forget to leave a review in the review jar if you're so moved!

There are some things you do not want to hear your governor say to you, and some conversations that can only happen in a moving vehicle. That I was experiencing both at the same time told you something about the kind of day I was having. We were driving back to Belgravia nick after a truly exhausting few hours in the Empress State Building hashing out the state of Operation Marigold and then getting ambushed by MI5, and I wanted to spend the drive staring out the window and not thinking about anything in particular. Only two days ago I’d barely missed the Faceless Man and had a house collapse on me, so my week as whole was not going well. This conversation did not seem likely to improve it.

“Peter, I believe I owe you apology.”

“Sir?”

Nightingale kept his eyes on the road, apparently focused on driving. “Despite your fast talking back there—that was well done, by the way—Folsom had a fair point.”

That was news to me. I tried to remember whether Folsom had said anything over the course of the two-hour meeting that was actually worth something. “He did?”

“You’ve been placed in an extraordinary number of dangerous situations over the past two and a half years,” Nightingale said. “Situations more dangerous than any apprentice should be expected to face.”

“I’m not just an apprentice,” I pointed out. “I’m also a police constable. It’s my job to face dangerous situations.”

“Nonetheless. Police constables are not normally exposed to the level of risk to which you have been exposed.”

I didn’t say anything, because he was right. Most police officers went their entire careers without being almost burned alive, or fighting magical chimaeras, or getting buried under Tube platforms, or jumping off the roof of exploding buildings, or any of the other crazy things that had happened to me since I’d interviewed a ghost at Covent Garden. Or, if I was honest, since DCI Nightingale walked into my life, because if he hadn’t requested me for the Punch case I would have gone on to the Case Progression Unit, ghost or no ghost.

“I should never have allowed the Folly to become a department of one,” Nightingale continued. “If I had not, there would be more ‘Falcon-capable personnel,’ as Folsom put it, to protect you from the excessively dangerous aspects of the job while you completed your training.”

It was only the third time Nightingale had ever suggested I needed to be protected from anything—the first was from the horrors of the Strip Club of Dr. Moreau, and the second was from the decision to execute Simone and her sisters via paramilitary death squad. Considering that one of those things I definitely did want to be protected from and the other I definitely didn’t, I wasn’t sure how I felt about this.

“You couldn’t know,” I offered. “You thought magic was going away. Everyone thought that.”

“Sometimes I wonder if I only wanted to think that,” Nightingale said softly. “At any rate, by the seventies the evidence to the contrary was incontrovertible. I should have begun training an apprentice or two then.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” I said honestly. “If you had a couple fully-trained wizards lying around I don’t think you’d have been desperate enough to take me on, and I’d be stuck in the CPU right now doing paperwork.”

“I doubt you could ever be ‘stuck’ anywhere for very long,” Nightingale said, lightly enough, but it was a compliment and I appreciated it. He didn’t hand out a lot of compliments.

We drove in comfortable silence for a few minutes and I thought that was the end of it, but then Nightingale said, “You don’t regret it, then? Taking the oath?”

I thought about all the craziness—the exploding buildings, the Faceless Man, almost dying more times than I could count. And about all the people I’d met, Mama Thames and Father Thames, Beverly Brook, even Nightingale himself. And the things I’d learned, _lux_ and _impello_ , revenants and unicorns, heck, even Latin grammar. And I thought about Lesley’s beautiful, ruined face.

“No,” I said. “I don’t regret it.”

Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw Nightingale smile. “I meant what I told Agent Finula,” he said. “You are an exceptionally gifted student. And I certainly wasn’t desperate.”

Two compliments out of Nightingale in one conversation was a little overwhelming. There were a lot of things I wanted to say to him but I didn’t know how to say any of them, so I just said, “Thank you, sir.”

I thought his smile looked sad, or maybe bittersweet, but I didn’t dare look at him to check. We both kept our eyes on the windscreen, because that’s one of the unspoken rules of conversations like these, the ones you can only have in a moving vehicle.


End file.
